Payvment Tells Facebook Friends What You Want, Own

We asked Christian Taylor, chief executive officer of Payvment, about his company’s new open graph actions: want and own.

How many sellers have implemented the technology and how many buyers have transacted in it since Payvment implemented new open graph actions?

We have had these features in beta since mid-November, and they are now turned on to all of our 100,000-plus sellers and over 1.1 million shoppers who visit Payvment stores and the shopping mall.

Every product in every store can be wanted, owned, or both. If you click on want or own on a few products in the shopping mall it will show in your ticker and timeline.

What options do you offer for people to limit whether and to what extent Payvment activity goes out to news feeds?

Unlike several of the frictionless sharing implementations (like listening to music or reading articles), our activity post requires an affirmative click by the user — on the want or own buttons — so we do not offer additional options. If the shopper doesn’t want to share, they don’t have to click.

Also, any activity published is governed by the user’s Facebook privacy settings, which we respect — so if the person is sharing only with family, that’s who will see our actions too.

How do Payvment’s new actions compare with the features and functionality found on top ecommerce websites like Amazon.com?

These actions don’t exist on Amazon.com or other large eCommerce sites — they were built in the pre-social era and are focused on search-based product discovery — or navigating a product tree.

The new Payvment actions are meant to increase and enhance social discovery, which is at the core of the Payvment experience — how to find great new products and gifts for and through my friends and also people with shared passions and interests.

And these actions flow into the Facebook Timeline and Ticker for discovery of Payvment by each shopper’s friends. We believe this is more powerful for many types of shopping and is core to our user experience. This type of navigation and discovery just isn’t possible on Amazon.com.

How does Payvment polling compare to Facebook’s native questions and polls applications? Why use a separate application?

Payvment Polls are similar to Facebook questions, but go beyond to enable products (with their images) to be choices instead of just text questions — and we make it really easy to do this. This is key for sellers who are aiming to create conversations around their products. We also include the ability to share the poll off Facebook via Twitter and Google Plus to reach a broader audience.

We use a separate application so that we can enable products to be featured and enable the sharing features (and there’s currently no available API for Facebook questions for us to use).

What else do you want to tell AllFacebook readers about the new Payvment actions?

These more focused actions will encourage many more shoppers to engage with products, build wish lists, and vote in polls – and allow you to get your friends what they really want for their next birthday!

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